The Last Secret, page 31
Taras kissed his mother’s cheek and sat down beside Zoya. Savka took out a pack of cigarettes; after lighting one and taking a long first drag, she exhaled smoke slowly out of her lungs, studying her two children and the awkward silence that hung between them. It was strange that her son hadn’t kissed his sister. She’d thought they were becoming close.
Taras, clearly agitated, had moved to the edge of his chair, and Zoya, oblivious, playfully ran her hand over the stubble growing like a shadow on his head. “There’s no lice here. Grow your hair, man.”
“I’m used to it short,” he said, leaning away from her with a frown.
“Haven’t you noticed?” Zoya teased. “The Canadians wear it long.”
“I don’t wish to look Canadian.” The waitress brought him a coffee and took his order. Taras reached for the sugar and glanced at Zoya for the first time since he’d arrived, then back at his mother. “I’ve been out to see Jeanie,” he said at last.
Jeanie. Two scarce meetings, and Taras spoke her name with a kind of reverence. And that starstruck look of his—why, he was a little in love with her. How could he not be? The girl not only summed up his very existence, she personified it. Savka tilted her head, waiting for him to continue.
“Jeanie’s memories are coming back.” Something sparked in his eyes, and Savka immediately knew that he’d been intimate with the artist. “Mama, do you remember a nurse named Kay?”
Savka nodded, waiting for her racing heart to slow. “The tall one, with an English accent.” She’d underestimated the lengths her son would go to find out what had happened to his father. How had he learned so much about that time, about the hospital and the nurses?
The waitress came by to refill her and Zoya’s coffee cups. As soon as she was gone, Taras looked at his sister. “Kay said you were ‘skulking in the hallway,’ and you didn’t want to go in while Tato was visiting.” He paused then studied her hair. “She described your dark curls.”
Savka could feel her throat close. She looked at her daughter, and said, her voice strained, “You were there, the night Marko disappeared?”
Zoya lowered her eyes in resignation. “He’d come home earlier and packed his suitcase, as he always did before leaving on a trip,” she admitted. “He was swearing and throwing things—freaking out. He shouted insults at me, said he was going to the hospital to see you, make you face what you’d done. Then he would leave us, forever.”
Taras gave his sister such a mournful look, Savka wondered if he suspected that Zoya killed his father. “Men were following Marko,” Savka said, anxious to steer his interest away from Zoya. “Bad men, who thought he had something they wanted.”
But Taras was not to be deterred. “You followed him to the hospital,” he said to his sister. “Why?”
“I was afraid he would hurt her, so I broke my piggy bank,” Zoya replied, too calmly. “I got a taxi and went after him.”
“Tato wouldn’t hurt Mama—she’d just had an operation.” Taras gave Zoya a searching look. “The nurse said she asked if you were going in to see her, and you ran away.”
Savka’s heart jumped a beat. The smell of fried food drifted to her from the diner kitchen, and it was everything she could do not to retch. She stared at her daughter, remembering what she’d shouted to Marko that day he told her she couldn’t speak Polish under his roof.
I hate you so much, I wish you would die.
Then Marko was dead not one week later.
“I stood outside her room,” Zoya said, stammering under her brother’s relentless interrogation. “I heard them argue. When that nurse went in, Marko was shouting. Before he left her room, I ran down the hall and ducked into the stairwell, heading to the main floor, thinking I’d beat him to his car. I waited for him in the parking lot, but he didn’t come down, so I left.”
“Why would you wait for him?” Savka asked, finally breaking her silence.
“To finally tell him he destroyed our lives.”
Taras tapped his fingers against his coffee cup, thinking. Savka had not seen him so despondent, so angry, and it frightened her.
“Did you see this man who came up,” he finally asked his sister, “claiming to be Tato’s brother?”
“What man?” Zoya stared angrily at him. “It was late when I left. The nurses had gone back to the main desk.”
At that moment, the waitress delivered their eggs, and Taras waited while she arranged the plates on the table.
Zoya sat back in her chair. “You think I killed him and stuffed him in a laundry bin?” Her voice was shrill, and several other diners turned their heads. “Come on, Taras—this is getting trippy.”
Taras began to eat with deliberation, as if he were still in the camps, desperate to nourish himself before the food was stolen. “Why didn’t you tell us you were there?” he asked between bites.
Zoya ignored his question. “I’m glad he’s dead, but I didn’t kill him.”
Savka couldn’t touch her food, she couldn’t speak. The only way to stop Taras from interrogating Zoya was to tell the truth. Not all of it, of course. But some part of what she’d come to realize that day with Lev at the Stanley Park Zoo. She put down her fork and leaned across the table to take her daughter’s hand. “You wondered why Marko hated you. You don’t resemble him…or me for that matter. He feared you were the child of another man.”
Zoya pushed her plate away, her eyes blank and expressionless, as if this was information she’d always known would come. “Am I the child of another man?”
Savka sat back. If she opened her mouth again, she might scream. But there was no avoiding the truth now. “Your father is an NKVD agent.”
Taras carefully placed his fork and knife on his empty plate. “I remember Belyakov sending Ilyin back…he told him to search you again, make sure they hadn’t missed another shtafeta. Mama, if I’d known…” he trailed off, an odd, stunned expression on his face.
As realization dawned slowly over Zoya, her face crumpled. “My father was your rapist…” she whispered.
Savka gulped the last of her coffee, got herself under control, then told her two children, in halting words, some of what had happened that day in the forest, how she’d not remembered until shortly before Marko’s disappearance, that an NKVD soldier had violated her while she was unconscious. “It came to me in pieces. But it was a long time ago,” she said, more for her own benefit than Zoya’s. “We must put it behind us.”
Zoya’s dark eyes were stormy. “So, I was conceived as a fuck you to Marko and the work he was doing with the SS,” she said in her characteristically frank manner. “And he had the nerve to punish me for it.” Other diner customers were now openly staring at them and Savka reddened.
Her daughter stood abruptly, sending her chair flying. “Maybe he got the death he deserved!” She stomped out of the diner and left Savka staring blankly after her.
Taras did not watch her go, for his eyes were now on his mother. “That day in the forest,” he mused, “Lieutenant Belyakov ordered his men to take me up the hill. He spoke to you quietly. What was it he whispered?”
Savka regarded her son with defiance. Since he’d shown up at her door, Taras had treated her with deference, honor, not asking questions that he must have turned over in his head the entire time he was in prison.
But he was asking them now.
After a long pause, she said, “The officer told me that if the NKVD couldn’t have Marko Ivanets or his wife, they would have his son.”
A muscle twitched at the corner of his mouth. “Mama—”
“Taras, it was a long time ago and the worst day of my life.” She hoped he would back off, but her son had a curious glint in his eye that told her he meant to see this through, regardless of how much pain it caused her.
“What did you agree to do?”
The implication hovered in the air. “I had been shot, Tarasyku, I was bleeding to death.” She placed a tentative hand on his arm. “How could I remember everything he said?”
Taras gave her a long, loaded look. “I always wondered why Belyakov just left you there.”
Savka stared down at her eggs, now congealing on the plate. “They thought I was dying.”
“Kuzak found you and removed the bullet?” His voice was respectful, but she could hear the doubt there.
“Kuzak banished me.”
“Why?”
“He…suspected that I’d been turned,” she murmured, feeling drained by the burden of secrets she’d kept for so long.
“The nurse Kay said you had a Russian visitor before Tato came in, before he disappeared.”
The hairs on the back of Savka’s neck stood up with foreboding. Taras could never know that Belyakov was her Soviet handler, that he made her spy on his father and still ordered her out on useless assignments. She took out her pack of cigarettes and let Taras light one for her. Inhaling deeply, she waited for the smoke to soothe her nerves. “The nurse is lying. I can’t remember a Russian visitor.”
“Belyakov was here in 1959. Is he still here? Is he following me?”
Smoke from her cigarette curled up and around her spinning head. “No,” she lied. Her arm went suddenly numb, just as it had the moments after she was shot twenty-eight years ago.
“I have something to tell you.” Taras pushed his coffee cup away. “I went this morning to the Ukrainian Cultural Centre and found a man who knew Tato. He said my father went to New York several times before he disappeared, to work with Mykola Lebed.” Taras leaned forward, his eyes dancing with excitement. “Tato left his car behind to throw off whoever was following him. Mama, all this time, he’s been in New York…with Lebed.”
41
JEANIE
Salt Spring Island
december 11, 1972
“jesuschristalmighty, she really is here.” Pat has just returned from Vancouver, reeking of hairspray from a fancy salon visit and wearing a new green wool coat that must have cost her—or me—a pretty penny. She stands in the living room, watching Kay swim back and forth in the bay. Pat looks as though she’d like to strangle her fellow nurse with her bare hands.
And I’d like to strangle her. What the hell did you have to do with Taras’s father’s disappearance? But I say nothing, because I won’t let Pat’s griping shake me off the cloud of love I’m floating upon. I flush at the memory of Taras’s hands on my shoulders only a few hours ago, before he left, as he shared his plans to visit the Ukrainian émigré community in Vancouver and ask more about his father, then to question his mother and sister.
“Escape with me,” Taras had said before getting into his car, the two of us standing close together, heads touching, still in our own private world.
“First, I need to fire Pat,” I said, kissing his cheek. “Then you can return and stay…”
But Taras can only stay if Pat is gone. And I haven’t quite figured out how to fire her. I don’t want to look at her miserable face, or even acknowledge her reentry into my life this morning. I need Kay’s help. “Kay has come to see me,” I explain to my caregiver as the sun battles its way out of the haze. “All the way from Africa.”
“By God,” Pat fumes. “I’m not going to let her stay longer than a goddam week.”
After the difficulties yesterday with Kay, I can’t argue Pat’s point. And Taras was wrong—besides Pat’s call here yesterday, it’s obvious that she hasn’t spoken to Kay since the day she left for Africa. Clearly, there’s no sinister plan between them to commit me. Kay will help me tell Pat she’s fired and must leave immediately.
With an oblique glance, Pat hands over my morning medication cup. I reluctantly accept it, noticing as I do, that it contains two orange pills instead of one.
She’s upped my dose of chlorpromazine.
Pat crosses her arms and looks at me, her face a guarded blank. Gazing down at the medication cup, my breath shallow with panic, I hash out a mad plan. One pill I can easily spit out without her noticing, but two will require a circus act in my mouth. She follows me into the kitchen and fetches a glass of water, watching as I dutifully swallow the contents of the cup under her stern gaze, pushing the two slick, round ones to the side of my cheek. When she slips out the back door, presumably for a furtive cigarette near the compost pile, I remove the pills, soggy and congealed, from my mouth. One of them still sports the faded number SKF T76 on the side. But the sink is full of soapy dish water. The back door handle rattles and I let out a startled cry, yanking out the garbage can from under the sink. Hurriedly, I bury the two pills among the plastic wrap and coffee grounds.
Feeling brave—or very desperate—I snatch the percolator off the stove, despite the heat it emits. When Pat stomps back in, I’m standing at the counter, pouring coffee into my favorite cup.
“The last thing you need is more coffee,” she says, face like a hurricane. “Your hands are shaking.”
Silence and brooding. Later I’ll be sorry, later I’ll wish I’d played along, Jeanie the puppet, Jeanie the easily controlled prisoner. But without too many doses of chlorpromazine careening through my blood, I’m feeling confident, clear-headed. I can’t resist turning to her. “I’ll do what I like.”
She watches, wild-eyed as I swan past her—coffee cup in hand—down the hallway and out the door without stopping to put on a coat. Free and easy, I march across the boardwalk and pause at the door of the guest suite, smiling to myself, remembering last night and Taras’s tender words to me as he drifted a gentle finger across the scars on my breasts. This is art.
Tuna has followed me out of the house and climbs the stairs behind me, his old joints practically creaking. In the studio, I crank the blues station and pace, noticing that at some point after she arrived this morning, Pat had come in and placed the blank canvas she’d prepared for the Paris financier’s commission firmly on my main easel. I’d much rather play with the abstract of Taras, but my work ethic whispers its obligation to Octavius Karbuz.
I regard Pat’s substandard attempt at an underpainting, whilst plotting to call Aunt Suze’s lawyer for a referral to an accountant, or someone who can investigate Pat’s transactions with my art dealer. I’ll finish this commission on time and get all the money for it.
I sketch in a half-hearted composition of sea, island, sky, and throw down my rag to pick up a flat brush, mixing titanium white pigment with a smidge of ultramarine blue, then apply burnt sienna to my palate, pulling in more white. After washing in sky, I take up a round, pointed brush and spend the next hour tapping in some clouds and daydreaming of Taras.
Before being released from the hospital, I often lay in bed, my skin on fire and silently asking, who will ever love me? At the time, the answer had been—absolutely no one. Now it’s: a man who was hurt just as profoundly. Taras has awoken something in me I thought had died, and that part of me happens to be sick and tired of Pat. How can I live even one more day with her in my house? I don’t have long to wait, for Kay will soon be finished her swim. Perhaps she’ll fire Pat the moment she sees her.
I step back to let the paint dry a little before I go in with the tree line. Another memory of Taras sends tingles along my spine, and I turn to look at the abstract on the other easel, stopping short when I realize it’s no longer there. With frantic gasps, I tear through the entire studio, but the painting of Taras is nowhere to be found. Did she take it? The idea that Pat could have destroyed it tips me over the edge.
I’m filled with rage, but also empowered by the fact that I have a lover, a handsome Ukrainian man who is quite possibly the best thing that’s ever come down that drive. I charge to the window and glare down at the house. There’s a blur of activity in the kitchen, so I grab the binoculars I keep to watch birds at the feeder near the waterfall, and adjust the focus. Pat’s face comes into the room with me. She stands at the kitchen counter looking confused, unsettled. Does this calm, together version of Jeanie frighten her? I sincerely hope so.
What’s she doing? Cleaning furiously, I see, swiping at the counters with a feverish energy one usually reserves for mold control. Pat turns and I notice Kay come into the room, wrapped in a towel, her hair still wet from her swim. How fortuitous that I’ll witness their first confrontation. Thirteen years since they’ve seen each other and they’re already speaking heatedly about something.
Lowering the binoculars, I mutter, “Fire her, fire her…” But the words die in my mouth when I remember Kay passing me in the hallway this morning, shortly after Taras left, on her way out for her swim. She stared impassively, her lips in a tight moue of disapproval. “I saw your friend leave. He certainly looked pleased with himself.” Her voice had a knife-like edge.
I’d felt myself blush. In high school, I’d missed all the incessant gushing among girls over their boyfriends. I wanted to tell Kay I’d fallen in love with Taras the first time I’d seen him running up the headland to save me from myself. But something held me back.
As Kay watched my face turn what was surely an embarrassing shade of scarlet, her own expression morphed into one of distaste. “I hope you didn’t throw yourself at him,” she said and pushed past me to the door.
I’d stared after her, mortified, but put it off to her nerves at the prospect of facing Pat, after all the years they’d been adversaries. Lifting the binoculars again, I watch the two of them now in the kitchen. When Kay slowly approaches Pat, I hold my breath. Will there be fisticuffs?
Pat takes a single sheet of paper from the top of the fridge and holds it out to Kay, and I fiddle with the focus on the binoculars, sure that she’s somehow got hold of my new last will and testament, but it can’t be. That’s four pages long. Kay accepts the paper, and, lifting it to her face, begins to read. Pat leans toward her, pointing out a certain passage. They’re standing too close together for enemies, there’s an easy familiarity and a kind of relief in their manner, as though the two of them are catching up after a long absence. But Kay despises Pat! And Pat has never mentioned her these past thirteen years.
